Movie Reviews Only

The plot hinges on rather too much coincidence, and some lines of the British-accented dialogue garble on the soundtrack, but the film offers charming performances and a vivid sense of time, place and human dignity.&dash; South Florida Sun-Sentinel - EDIT

This dramedy about middle-class Londoners in their 60s and 70s getting on with life has a genial watchability - even a stubborn relevance - thanks to its crackerjack ensemble cast, who play characters just eccentric enough to keep things tasty.&dash; Washington Post - EDIT

The hybrid of live action and animation is quite handsomely rendered and amusing, as it happens. But its creators overindulge, to the point of crassness, in cliches drawn from action movies and pop culture.&dash; Washington Post - EDIT

Suffers from a confusing narrative and a style of computer animation that blurs the lines between the real and the animated in a way that evokes the discomfiting artifice of "The Polar Express."&dash; Washington Post - EDIT

The overlong movie lurches from chase to battle to soul-searching quietude - and then back again - in frustratingly generic action-movie style. It's just one darn thing after another.&dash; Washington Post - EDIT

It is smarter and more humorous than the first movie, and its digital effects - which include stampeding albino rhinos and mountain-scraping aerobatics - are far snazzier, as one would expect.&dash; Washington Post - EDIT

In the title role, wrestler-turned-actor John Cena gives Ferdinand just the right balance of sweetness and strength. He becomes the wholly convincing center of the parable.&dash; Washington Post - EDIT

The story takes improbably lurid turns and sometimes tangles its thread. Yet at every twist, it is saved by the moral weight of the tale, the gorgeous, haunted vistas in Eric Maddison's cinematography and the solidly credible, equally haunted acting.&dash; Washington Post - EDIT

Intermittently diverting as it may be, the movie bears all the earmarks of a cobbled-together, made-by-committee product, poorly aimed at its tween-and-younger target audience in look, tone, music and story.&dash; Washington Post - EDIT

Tiresome and messy, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor borrows mightily from the Indiana Jones franchise and various martial-arts films, but it doesn't do what those films did nearly as well.&dash; Washington Post - EDIT

Apart from Jon Voight, slumming and turning in a rather droll, if lonely, performance as the German-accented villain, the movie amounts to cynical, cutesy claptrap.&dash; Seattle Post-Intelligencer - EDIT

Kids 8 and older may laugh now and again at this ill-conceived animated comic fable about barnyard animals who party like frat boys when the farmer isn't looking, but it surely doesn't earn the laughs through good storytelling or beautiful animation.&dash; Washington Post - EDIT

Director Mike Mitchell deftly blends two genres -- the high school romance and the special-effects-laden superhero comic book adaptation -- and manages to spoof yet salute both with a refreshing lack of pretension.&dash; Washington Post - EDIT

A surprisingly witty and sophisticated spy movie spoof that will tickle adult pet lovers and still capture kids 6 and older with its boy-and- his-dog love story and pet slapstick.&dash; Washington Post - EDIT